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^ GII^LS 
STUDENT DAYS 
AND AFTER 



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J E ANNETTE MARKS" 




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COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



A GirFs Student Days and After 



A GirVs Student Days 
and After 



By 
JE ANNETTE MARKS, M. A. 

{Welles ley) 

With an Introduction by 
MART EMMA TFOOLLET, LL. D. 

President of Mt. Holyoke College 




New York Chicago Toronto 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, rgii, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 






New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 125 North Wabash Ave. 
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 



©CU305312 



Inscribed 

to 

MARY EMMA WOOLLEY, LL. D, 



Introduction 

THE school and college girl is an 
important factor in our life to-day. 
Around her revolve all manner of 
educational schemes, to her are open all 
kinds of educational opportunities. There 
was never an age in which so much thought 
was expended upon her, or so much interest 
felt in her development. 

There are many articles written and many 
speeches delivered on the responsibility of 
parents and teachers — it may not be amiss 
occasionally to turn the shield and show that 
some of the responsibility rests upon the girl 
herself. After all, she is the determining 
factor, for buildings and equipment, courses 
and teachers accomplish little without her 
cooperation. 

It is difficult for the "new girl," whether 
in school or college, to realize the extent to 
which the success of her school life depends 
[7] 



Introduction 



upon herself. In a new environment, sur- 
rounded by what seem to her " multitudes " 
of new faces, obliged to meet larger demands 
under strange and untried conditions, she is 
quite likely to go to the other extreme and 
exaggerate her own insignificance. Some- 
times she is fortunate enough to have an 
older sister or friend to help her steer her 
bark through these untried waters, but gen- 
erally she must find her own bearings. 

To such a girl, the wise hints in the 
chapters which follow this introduction are 
invaluable, giving an insight into the mean- 
ing of fair-play in the classroom as well as 
on the athletic field; the relation between 
physical well-being and academic success ; 
the difference between the social life that is 
re-creative and that which is " nerz^es-crea- 
tive " ; the significance of loyalty to the 
school and to the home ; the way in which 
school days determine to a large degree the 
days that come after. These, and many 
other suggestions, wise and forceful, I com- 
[8] 



In tro du ctio 



n 



mend not only to the new girl, but also to 
the " old girl " who would make her school 
and college days count for more both while 
they last and as preparation for the work 
that is to follow. 

Mary E. Woolley. 

Mt. Holyoke College^ 



South Hadleyj Massachusetts, 



[9] 



CONTENTS 





A Word to the Wise . 


13 


I. 


The Ideal Freshman . 


17 


II. 


The Girl and the School . 


25 


III. 


Friendships .... 


33 


IV. 


The Student's Room . 


41 


V. 


The Tools of Study and Their 






Use 


54 


VI. 


The Joy of Work 


6i 


VII. 


Fair-Play .... 


70 


VIII. 


The Right Sort of Leisure 


78 


IX. 


The Outdoor Runway 


88 


X. 


A Girl's Summer . 


99 


XI. 


From the School to the Girl 


107 


XII. 


The Work to Be . 


115 



["] 



A W^ord to the Wise 

WE train for basket-ball, golf, tennis 
or for whatever sport we have the 
most liking. Is there any reason 
why we should not use the same intelligence 
in the approach to our general school life ? 
Is there any reason why we should make an 
obstacle race, however good and amusing 
exercise that may be, out of all our school 
life ? We don't expect to win a game with a 
sprained wrist or ankle, and there really is no 
reason why we should plan to sprain the back 
of school or college life by avoidable mistakes. 
The writer believes in the girl who has the 
capacity for making mistakes, — that head- 
long, energetic spirit which blunders all too 
easily. But the writer knows how much 
those mistakes hurt and how much energy 
might be saved for a life that, with just a 
pinch less of blunder, might be none the less 
savoury. School and college are no place for 

[13] 



A Word to the Wise 

vocal soloists, and after some of us have sung 
so sweetly and so long at home, with every 
one saying, "Just hear Mary sing, isn't it 
wonderful ! " it is rather trying, you know, to 
go to a place where vocal solos are not 
popular. And we wish some one — at least I 
did— had told us all about this fact as well as 
other facts of school life. Anyway it should 
be a comfort to have a book lying on the 
table in our school or college room, or at 
home, which will tell us why Mary, after 
having been a famous soloist at home made 
a failure or a great success in chorus work at 
school. Such a book is something like having 
a loaded gun in readiness for the robber. We 
may never use the shotgun or the book but 
they are there, with the reassuring sense of 
shot in the locker. 

It is something, is it not, to have a little 
book which will tell you how to get into 
school and how to get out (for at times there 
seem to be difficulties in both these direc- 
tions) — in short, to tell you something of 
[H] 



A Word to the Wise 



many things : your first year at school or 
college, your part in the school life, the friend- 
ships you will make, your study and how to 
work in it, the pleasure and right kind of 
spirit involved in work, the quiet times, as 
well as the jolly times, out-of-doors, your 
summers and how to spend them, what the 
school has tried to do for you ; and, as you 
go out into the world, some of the aspects, 
whether you are to be wife, secretary or 
teacher, of the work which you will do. Of 
one thing you may be certain ; that behind 
every sentence of this little book is ex- 
perience, that here are only those opinions 
of which experience has made a good, whole- 
some zwieback. 

I wish to take this opportunity to thank my 
friend, Mrs. Belle Kellogg Towne, editor of 
The Girls^ Companion and Young People^ s 
Weekly, Chicago, for her cooperation in al- 
lowing me to use half the material in this litde 
book ; also Dr. C. R. Blackall, of Philadelphia. 

Camp Runway. J. M. 

[15] 



THE IDEAL FRESHMAN 

FRESHMAN year, the beginning year, 
the year of new experiences, new 
delights, new work, new friends, new 
surroundings ; the year that may mean much 
to a girl, that may answer some of the 
questions that have lain long in heart and 
mind, that will surely reveal her more clearly 
to herself, that may make her understand 
others better and help her to guess something 
of the riddle of the years to come ! 

What has the student done to get ready 
for this year? If she were going camping 
she would know that certain things were neces- 
sary to make the expedition a success. With 
what excitement and pleasure, what thoughts 
of jolly camp-fires, deep, sweet-smelling 
forests, and long days afoot, she would pre- 
pare everything. She would not let any one 
else do this for her, for that would mean 

[17] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

losing too much of the fun. But ih^ freshman 
yeuTy what about the thinking and planning 
for that, also an expedition into a new world, 
and a veritable adventure of a vast deal more 
importance than a few days or weeks of 
camping? Would she enter forests upon 
whose trees the camp-fires throw many shad- 
ows, follow the stream that cleaves its way 
through the woods, go along the runway of 
deer or caribou or moose, with a mind to all 
intents and purposes a blank? No, her 
mind would be vivid with thoughts and 
interests. 

With the same keen attention should she 
enter the new year at school or college, and 
as she passes through it, thinking about all 
that comes to her, she will find it growing 
less and less difficult and more and more 
friendly. She will consider what the fresh- 
man year is to be like, think of what sorts of 
girls she is to meet and make friends with, 
what the work will be, what she may expect 
in good times from this new adventure, and, 
[i8] 



The Ideal Freshman 

thoughtful about it all, make the minimum of 
mistakes and get the maximum of benefit. 

Here come some of the girls who are 
entering school and college with her — bright- 
haired, dark-haired, rosy or pale, tall and thin, 
fat and short, clever and average, desirable 
and undesirable, — in fact, all sorts and condi- 
tions of girls. Who is to be the leader of them 
all ? She is the ideal freshman^ a nice, well- 
set-up girl who does not think too much of 
herself, who is not self-conscious, and who 
does not forget for what she is sent to school. 
Despite the temptations of school life she 
uses her days wisely and well. She does not 
isolate herself, for she sees the plan and value 
of the recreative side of school-days. She is 
already laying the foundations for a successful, 
useful, normal existence, establishing confi- 
dence at the outset and not handicapping 
herself through her whole course by making 
people lose their faith in her. Our ideal 
freshman may be the girl who is to do 
distinguished work ; she may be the student 

[19] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

who does her best ; and because it is her best, 
the work, though not brilliant, is distinguished 
by virtue of her effort. She may be the girl 
who is to make a happy home life through 
her poise and earnestness and common sense. 
Whoever she is, in any event in learning to 
do her best she is winning nine-tenths of the 
battle of a successful career. It is she, at- 
tractive, able, earnest, with the "fair-play'* or 
team-play spirit in all she does, true to herself 
and to others, whom every school wants, 
whose unconscious influence is so great in 
building up the morale of any school. Mark 
this girl and follow her, for she is worthy of 
your hero worship. 

This is the girl who goes into school in 
much the same spirit that she would enter 
upon a larger life. She is not a prig and she 
is not a dig, but she knows there are respon- 
sibilities to be met and she meets them. She 
expects to have to think about the new con- 
ditions in which she finds herself and to 
adjust herself to them, and she does it. She 

[20] 



The Ideal Freshman 

knows the meaning of the team-play spirit 
and she takes her place quietly on the team, 
one among many, and both works and plays 
with respect for the rights and positions of 
others. It is in the temper of the words 
sometimes stamped upon the coins of our 
country — E Pluribus Unum — that she makes 
a success of her school life. She knows that 
not only is our country bigger than any one 
of its states, but also that every school is 
bigger than any one of its members whether 
teacher or student. In a small family at 
home conditions have been more or less made 
for her, just as they are for other girls. Yet 
she knows that the school life is complicated 
and complex, and it is impossible for her to 
feel neglected where a more self-centred or 
spoiled giri fails to see that in this new life 
she is called upon to play a minor part but 
nevertheless a part upon which the school 
must rely for its esprit de corps. She goes 
with ease from the somewhat unmethodical 
life of the home to the highly organized rou- 

[21] 



A GirV s Student Days and After 

tine of the school because she understands 
the meaning of the word ** team-play." She 
has the cooperative spirit. 

Yet there are other girls, too, in this school 
which the freshman is entering. There is the 
student who errs on the side of leading too 
workaday a life, and in so doing has lost some- 
thing of the buoyancy and breadth and "snap" 
which would make her associations and her 
work fresher and more vigorous. *'The 
Grind," she has been called, and if she recog- 
nize herself in this sketch, let her take care to 
reach out for a bigger and fuller life than she 
is leading. And there is, too, the selfish stu- 
dent whose "class-spirit" is self-spirit; and 
the girl who is not selfish but who uses herself 
up in too many interests, dramatic, athletic, 
society, philanthropic and in a dozen others. 
She is probably over-conscientious, a good 
girl in every way, but in doing too much she 
loses sight of the real aim of her school life. 
To these must be added another student,- — 
the freshman who skims the surface, and is, 

[22] 



The Ideal Freshman 

when she gets out, where she was when she 
entered — no, not quite so far along, for she 
has slipped back. She is selfish, relying upon 
the patience and burden-bearing capacity of 
her father and mother, as well as the school. 
No doubt every girl would meet her 
obligations squarely if she realized what was 
the underlying significance of the fresh- 
man year; the school life would surely be 
approached with a conscientious purpose. 
What a girl gets in school will much depend 
upon what she has to give. No girl is there 
simply to have a good time or merely to learn 
things out of books. Nor is she there to fill 
in the interim between childhood and young 
womanhood, when one will go into society, 
another marry, and a third take up some 
wage-earning career. No, she is there to 
carry life forward in the deepest, truest sense ; 
and the longer she can have to get an educa- 
tion and to make the best of the opportunities 
of school and college life, the richer and fuller 
her after-years will be. Both middle life and 

[23] 



A GirTs Student: Days and After 

old age will be deeper and stronger. Let us 
think about these girls, let us think about 
what it means to be a freshman, and so 
lessen our difficulties and increase our 
pleasures ; let us have a big conception,— a 
large ideal always at heart— -of what the first 
year should be, and beginning well we shall 
be the more likely to end well 



[24] 



II 

THE GIRL AND THE SCHOOL 

INSIDE school or college the girl is in 
several ways responsible for the atmos- 
phere. Merely in her conversation she 
can be of service or dis-service. It may be 
simply a good joke which she is telling, but 
if the joke misrepresents the school she will, 
perhaps, do lasting harm. If she is hyper- 
critical — and there is nothing so contagious 
as criticism — she influences people in the 
direction of her thought ; she sets a current 
of criticism in motion. A student frequently 
gives vent to an opinion that is only half- 
baked — it is well, by the way, to make zwie- 
back of all our opinions before we pass them 
around as edible — about courses and instruct- 
ors. She does not realize that some opinions 
to be worth anything must be the result of 
a long process of baking, that a nibble from 

[25] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

the corner of a four months' or nine months' 
course will not, however understandingly it 
may be Fletcherized, tell you whether the 
course is going to be fruit cake, meringue or 
common soda crackers. She may think that 
she herself is so unimportant that what she 
says can't matter, or she may not mean what 
she says and be merely letting off steam. 
Nevertheless her influence is exerted. Some 
one showed an old lady, who had never been 
known to say anything in the least critical of 
any human being, the picture of a very fat 
man prominent in public life. She looked at 
it a moment, and then said sweetly : " My, 
isn't he plump ! " If only there were more 
old and young ladies like that dear soul ! 

There is another kind of conversation 
which may not be ill-natured and yet does 
harm. Idle gossiping, talking about things 
that are not worth while or speculating about 
affairs which are not our business and of 
which we know little or nothing. Akin to 
this is fashionably slangy conversation con- 

[26] 



The Girl and the School 

cerning the latest thing in books, magazine 
articles, trivial plays. For even the '' tone " 
of school or college conversation a student is 
responsible. She can make her school seem 
cheap or cultivated. The remarks which vis- 
itors overhear as they go from room to room 
or from building to building are likely to in- 
dicate the ''tone" of an institution. A cata- 
logue may say all it pleases about a school 
but in the end the school is judged by the 
women it educates and sends out, even as a 
tree is known by its fruit. Cultivated, strong 
women are worth more in advertisement than 
all the printed material in the world, however 
laudatory. 

When a girl has received everything her 
Alma Mater has to give, she has no right to 
be untrue to its fundamental aims and ideals, 
or to misrepresent it in any way, either 
by what she says or by her own behaviour. 
Every student in a large institution is in a 
sense a pensioner. No student can pay for 
what is given to her. Is it not a poor return 

[27] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

for her to be reflecting dishonour rather than 
honour upon her school ? 

There is a certain social selfishness in the 
way some students take their opportunities 
for granted without realizing that there are 
thousands and hundreds of thousands of girls 
who would give all that they possess for a tithe 
of such riches. Also, because of the sacrifice 
which is being made for them at home girls 
are selfish in taking their school or college 
life carelessly. The school has to bear much 
of the responsibility for the individual failure. 
But of this the student who is failing rarely 
thinks. Parents hold an institution to blame 
if it does not do for their child what they ex- 
pect it to do, when it may be the girl who is 
at fault. 

In the use she makes of her portion of 
inheritance, in the gift the school bestows on 
the student, there is a large social question 
involved. The school gives her of its wealth, 
the result of the accumulation of years and of 
the civic or philanthropic spirit of many 

[28] 



The Girl a7id the School 

men and women. This, if the girl's sense of 
responsibihty is what it should be, she feels 
bound to increase and hand on. It is the old 
noblesse oblige under new conditions of privi- 
lege. 

While she is still in school the girl dis- 
charges part of this obligation by realizing 
what is best for her school as an institution. 
A college or a big school is no place for 
vocal soloists. Its life is the life of an or- 
chestra, of many instruments playing to- 
gether. The student's sense of responsibility 
is shown by her attitude towards the corporate 
government and administration of the school. 
Instead of regarding the laws of her school 
as natural enemies, chafing against them, 
making fun of them or evading them if pos- 
sible, she has a duty in fulfilling them. The 
consciousness of this responsibility is the very 
heart and soul of the student self-government 
movement, for it recognizes not only the 
obligation placed upon its members by an 
institution, but also the wide influence one 

[29] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

girl may have on others. Student govern- 
ment knows that upper class girls can deter- 
mine the spirit of the under classes. Even 
looking at the matter from the lightest point 
of view, respectful and law-abiding ways are 
always well-bred ways. 

When a student becomes an alumna she 
can discharge a large part of her great 
responsibility by realizing that it is not any 
longer so much a question of what her school 
can give her as of what she can give to her 
school. One thing she can always give it — 
that is, kindly judgment. And she can ac- 
knowledge that her ideas of what her Alma 
Mater is after her own school-days may not 
be correct. The school, sad to say, is some- 
times placed in the position of the kindly old 
farmer who, hearing others call a certain man 
a liar, said : '* Waal now, I wouldn't say he 
wuz a liar. That's a bit harsh. I'd say he 
handled the truth mighty careless-like." 
Schools find that some of their alumnae 
handle the truth mighty careless-like. 

[30] 



The Girl and the School 

While she is still a student a girl's service 
to her school lies largely in her daily work, 
the mental muscle she puts into all that she 
does in the classroom and studies out of it. 
If because of her and a multiple of many 
girls like her, the college does not possess 
that sme qua non of all the higher mental 
life, an intellectual atmosphere, it is the stu- 
dent's and her multiple's fault. ** You may 
lead a horse to water but you cannot make it 
drink," may be an old adage, but it would be 
hard to improve upon it. You may set before 
students a veritable Thanksgiving feast of 
things intellectual, but if they have no eager- 
ness, no appetite for them, the feast remains 
untouched. Energy and hunger of the mind, 
not the anxious hosts, will in the end decide 
whether that feast is or is not to be eaten. 

The school considers not only scholarship 
but also the sum of all that it is, its culture, 
its attainment, its moral force, as these ele- 
ments are expressed in its living members, its 
students and its teachers — in short, its ideal- 

[31] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

ism. Idealism is having one's life governed 
by ideals, and an ideal is a perfect conception 
of that which is good, beautiful and true, 
(f the girl's life is not governed by ideals, 
how, then, can the school hope to have its 
idealism live or grow ? Frequently students 
think of the ideals of college or school 
as of something outside themselves, more 
or less intangible, with which they may 
or may not be concerned. Students cannot 
do their institution a greater injury than by 
harbouring such a thought, for if their sense 
of responsibility will only make the idea of the 
school personal, then indeed will the school 
be like that house upon which the rains de- 
scended and the winds blew but it fell not, 
for it was founded upon a rock. 



[32] 



Ill 

FRIENDSHIPS 

HOMESICKNESS and friendships, 
how much and how vivid a part 
they play in the first year, or years, 
of school life! An old coloured physician 
was asked about a certain patient who was 
very ill. " I'll tell you de truf," was the reply. 
"Widout any perception, Phoebe Pamela 
may die and she may get well ; dere's con- 
siderable danger bofe ways." I will tell you 
one truth about the first year of school life : 
friends there will surely be, and homesick- 
ness there is likely to be, — there is '' consider- 
able danger both ways." 

Even if a girl has never been away from 
home before, it is possible that she will not 
suffer from homesickness. It is probable, 
however, that the new surroundings in which 
the girl finds herself, and the separation from 
those who are the centre of her personal life, 
will bring on an attack of this most painful 

[33] 



A GirTs Student Days and After 

malady. It takes time to fit comfortably into 
the new surroundings, and meanwhile every- 
thing is strange. Homesickness is not to be 
laughed at, but it must be less deadly, less 
fatal than some people think it, or there 
would not be so many recoveries. Girls often 
weep when they enter school, and then after 
the long dreary years are really over, lived 
through, and the poor forlorn freshman is 
metamorphosed into the senior, they weep 
again. Is it not strange that these seniors 
who wept on entering school should weep 
also when leaving it ? It looks in the end as 
if Phoebe Pamela were sure to get well. Yet 
the effort to get well requires a fine effort at 
self-control, — an effort every girl is the better 
for making, although it may take everything 
plucky in a girl to " back up " her intention 
to remain in school. The earlier the student 
considers this question of homesickness the 
better. Let her face its possibilities before she 
goes away from home, and make up her 
mind, if she is attacked, resolutely to over- 

[34] 



Friendships 



come it. If it comes, let her never give up 
the struggle, for, by giving in, she will only 
lose ground in every way, morally, socially, 
intellectually. By her cowardice she will 
part with what she can never recover later. 

Many temptations follow in the wake of 
homesickness, and the most serious of all is 
to make friends too rapidly. It may be laid 
down as a rule that a friendship formed on 
this stop-gap principle, and too rapidly, is 
not likely to endure. Such a friendship is 
not a sane or a wise relation, for friendship is 
like scholarship : if it is worth anything at all 
it comes slowly. Impulsive, quickly forced 
friendships are not wise investments ; the very 
fact that they come so quickly implies an un- 
balanced state of idealizing, or lack of self- 
control. This does not mean that one is not 
to form pleasant acquaintances from the very 
beginning of the school life. Acquaintance- 
ship always holds something in reserve and 
is the safest prelude to a deeper and more 
vital friendship. 

[35] 



A GirTs Student Days and After 

There is no denying that there is great 
temptation to violent admirations and attrac- 
tions in school. In the first place, in school 
or college the girl is brought into contact with 
a large circle of people who are immensely- 
interesting to her. The whole atmosphere is 
full of novelty, of the unusual. Some of 
the students and teachers whom she meets 
for the first time represent a broader experi- 
ence, it may be, than her own home life has 
given her. They are often new types and 
new types are always interesting. 

I shall say nothing of the idealism of 
friendship— it plays its part in other books. 
It would seem sometimes as if almost too 
much emphasis had been placed upon the 
making of friendships in school, — friendship 
which is, after all, but a by-product, the most 
valuable it is true, nevertheless a by-product 
of the life. Wholly practical are the tests of 
friendship which I shall give. In the first 
place a friend is too absorbing who takes all 
of one's interest to the exclusion of everything 

[36] 



Friendships 



else : there should be interest in other peo- 
ple, other activities as well as in one's work. 
Such a friendship can only make a girl forget 
for what she has come to school. The new 
relation which disposes one to look with less 
respect and affection upon one's own people 
and home — and they, be it remembered, have 
stood the most valuable test of all, the test of 
time — cannot be a good influence. It may be 
said in general that an association which is 
developing the less fine traits in one's char- 
acter, giving emphasis to the less worthy sides, 
should be relinquished immediately, even at 
the cost of much heartache. The heartache 
will be only temporary ; the bad influence 
might become permanent. On the other 
hand, since friendship is giving as well as 
taking, one does well to consider the fact that 
if one's own part in it does not tell for good, 
there is just as much reason for stopping the 
friendship where it is. Some of these as- 
sociations — and this is a hard saying, I know 
— which seem everything at the time are 

[37] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

nothing, as the years will prove. A girl 
idealizes, and idealizes those who are not 
worthy. Inevitably the day comes when she 
laughs at herself, — if she does not do worse 
and pity herself for having been such a 
goose. 

Only a few of the friendships made in 
school are destined to endure. One of the 
foremost of those that last is founded on 
similarity of interest. Perhaps it is the girl 
with whom one has worked side by side in 
the laboratory, — a relation formed slowly and 
on a permanent basis. Many of the best of 
friends have come together through com- 
munity of interests, and this is a type of 
friendship for which men have a greater gift 
than women. 

There is still another type which develops 
because of some conspicuously noble or fine 
quality which proves attractive. Hero wor- 
ship, this, which enlarges one's self through 
the admiration given to another. Then there 
is the friendship based on a purely personal 

[38] 



Friendships 



attraction, with mutual respect and self-respect 
as its dedicated corner-stone. This does not 
mean that one cannot see any faults in the 
friend, or know that one's own are seen, 
without losing affection. There is always 
something flimsy and insecure about a friend- 
ship that simply idealizes. Any relation 
should be all the stronger for a frank acknowl- 
edgment of its imperfections. If a girl cares 
enough she will be willing to admit her own 
faults and wish to make herself more worthy 
to be a friend. 

And, finally, there is what might be called 
the lend-a-hand friendship, — the relation that 
springs into existence because of the need 
which is seen in another. It is not fair to 
make a packhorse of one's friend or to turn 
one's self into the leaning variety of plant, 
but it is fair and wise and right, if one is 
strong enough to accomplish the end in 
view, to lend a hand to another girl who is 
not making the best of herself. 

Have a good time but do not swear eternal 
[39] 



A GirVs Student Days and After 

allegiance in this first year to anybody, how- 
ever wonderful she may seem. Hold your- 
self in reserve, if for no other reason, then on 
account of the old friends at home, whether 
they be kin or no-kin, for they have been 
true. And remember, as I have said before, 
friendship is like scholarship and must by its 
nature come slowly. 



[40] 



IV 

THE STUDENT'S ROOM 

THERE has been a general improve- 
ment in student rooms, yet many- 
rooms to-day have altogether too 
much in them : too many pictures, too many 
banners, too much furniture, too many hang- 
ings. The great fault of most rooms is this 
overcrowding. If we were only heroic 
enough to make a bonfire of nine-tenths of 
all they contain we should see suddenly re- 
vealed possibilities for something like the 
ideal room. 

One serious and obvious objection to the 
overcrowding of rooms is the hygienic. I am 
tempted to say that this is the most important 
objection : indeed, since health is more im- 
portant than wealth, I will say so. A girl 
has neither the time nor the ability to keep so 
many articles in a room clean : and while she 
is busy attending to her studies, some cher- 

[41 "I 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

ished ornaments are not only laying up dust 
for the future, as a more regenerate life will 
lay up treasures, but also breeding germs, per- 
haps collecting the very germs which will 
take this girl away from school or college. 
Besides, bric-a-brac not only gathers dust and 
breeds germs but also wearies the nerves. 
It makes one tired to see so many things 
about, and tired to be held responsible for 
them. Without realizing it, we resist the 
amount of space they occupy and in their 
place want the air and sunshine. Subcon- 
sciously, most of us long to get rid of our 
bric-a-brac and then pull down the draperies 
that keep out the sunlight. The simpler the 
window draperies in a room, the more easily 
washed, the better and more attractive. For 
wholesome attractiveness there is no fabric 
that can excel a flood of warm sunshine. 
Any girl or woman who has curtains which 
she must protect from strong light by draw- 
ing down the shades is guilty of a household 
sin whose greatness she cannot know. That 

[42] 



The Student'' s Room 

same sunshine, freely admitted, will do more 
to cleanse a house than all the soap, all the 
brooms, and even all the vacuum cleaners 
ever invented. 

The so-called beauty of a room should 
always give way before the hygiene of a 
room. Not only should the room be sensibly 
furnished so that it may have plenty of air 
and light, but closets should not contain 
articles of furniture which belong where the 
air can reach them. There is a difference 
between a room that is not orderly and one 
that is not clean. A room that contains un- 
clean articles in drawers or closets, unclean 
floors, unclean rugs and hangings and un- 
clean walls, should not be tolerated for an 
instant. If a girl turns a combination bed- 
room and study in school or college into 
a kitchen, if an ice-cream freezer occu- 
pies all the foreground of this place she 
calls home, and chafing-dishes with cream 
bottles, sardine tins, cracker boxes, paper 
bags full of stale biscuits, fruit skins, dish- 
[43] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

cloths and grease-spotted walls, all the back- 
ground, it is impossible to have a clean room 
to live in. 

The Golden Rule applies to rooms as well 
as to human beings and should read, '* Do 
unto a room as you would it should do unto 
you." And not only for the sake of health 
should this Golden Rule for Rooms be ob- 
served but also for the sake of the college or 
school. The room that belongs to us only 
for a time should be as thoughtfully cared 
for as if it were our own personal property. 
There is something inconsistent, isn't there, 
in educating a girl in high thinking and fine 
ideals, if she is willing to live in a room that 
for uncleanliness many a woman in some 
crowded quarter of a city would consider a 
disgrace? Such contradiction in mind and 
surrounding is out of harmony with all one's 
ideal for a gentlewoman. 

Not only beauty is restful, peace-giving 
and peace-bringing, but so, also, are neatness 
and order. Orderliness helps to fit one for 
[44] 



The Student^ s Roo 



m 



work. There is undoubtedly some connec- 
tion between surroundings and one's mental 
state. In themselves disorder and confusion 
are irritating. The sight of a dirty child 
crying in the doorway of an untidy house 
suggests some connection between the 
wretchedness of the child and the squalor 
of the home. I often think of William 
Morris, the great craftsman and charming 
poet, who had much at heart the happiness of 
all people, especially the poor, and his ex- 
clamation, " My eye, how I do love tidiness ! " 
To him, to the artist, it was, as it is, beautiful 
George Eliot had to put even the pins in her 
cushion into some neat arrangement before 
she could sit down to write. Disorder wastes 
not only one's feelings and health, it also 
wastes one's time, for a lot of this commodity 
may be lost in looking for books, wraps, 
gloves and other things which are not put 
away properly. 

School ought to be a training for the life 
afterwards. That is why v/e go to school 
[45] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

isn't it ? Why should a girl indulge herself 
in habits which will make against her use- 
fulness in the life of the home or in whatever 
circumstance she may be ? There is a certain 
disciplinary value in order. Every great 
military school has recognized this. Laxness 
in the care of one's room may mean the 
habit of laxness in other and more important 
ways. Disorderliness indicates a certain 
tendency in character, and if a girl allows 
that sort of thing to go on she is very likely 
to show it in other ways. Untidiness in any 
of one's personal habits — and what could be 
more personal than a room? — should be 
taken up and corrected even as one attempts 
to correct any weak point in one's character. 
Do you know what is always — that is, if it 
is in it at all — the most beautiful thing in a 
room? It is something which the Creator 
meant all mankind should have, rich and 
poor, old and young alike ; it is something 
beyond the buying price of any wealth. It 
is the sunshine, more beautiful, more valuable 

[46] 



The Student'' s Room 

than expensive hangings that shut it out. 
Perhaps it is partly because it is inexpensive, 
God-given to all people, that housewives 
frequently draw their curtains against it. If 
they had to pay more for it than for carpets 
and hangings, you may be very sure that a 
great many husbands and fathers would be 
overworking in order that their families might 
buy a whole display of sunshine instead of 
tapestries. 

Do you know what is the most helpful 
thing you can have in your room, the article 
without which you cannot live in it at all, no 
matter how fine the rugs and bric-a-brac may 
be? Air I Air is the one thing which is 
almost instantly and absolutely indispensable 
to human life, for we breathe it in not only 
through our noses but also all over our skin. 
Every hundredth fraction of an inch of our 
bodies is feeding upon air, and the purer that 
air and the cooler the better and more invig- 
orating food it provides for the skin surface 
as well as for the lungs. The mind, for it is 
[47] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

housed in the body and its tenant, must de- 
pend for its vigour or tone upon the fresh air 
in school or college study. Even a very 
good head cannot work well set upon an 
anaemic body which is suffocating for want 
of good clean air. If you wish to do your 
best work and keep well, the first thing to do 
is not to open your books but to open your 
windows. After that the books and a reason- 
able number of hours of continuous study. 
American audience halls, pullmans, ordinary 
coaches and public buildings of all sorts, 
especially libraries, are notoriously over- 
heated and unventilated. It is the intelligent 
American girl and woman who, beginning 
with the home, will correct this evil. The 
schools are, on the whole, in the forefront of 
the fresh air movement, especially the public 
schools. As every one knows, the public 
schools are establishing open air rooms for 
their children who need them. Although 
there is much to be said about what a room 
should contain to make it attractive, it should 

[48] 



The Student'' s Roo 



m 



never be forgotten that sunshine and fresh 
air are more beautiful and more priceless 
than anything else which it can hold. 

The first object in furnishing a bare room 
is to make it habitable, — that is useful. Take 
the kitchen, for example, and usefulness is 
practically the sole object in fitting it up. 
And the curious thing about it all is that it 
cannot help being beautiful in a homely, 
motherly way, for it exemplifies one of the 
strongest elements of all beauty and that is 
service. The kitchen may be a very hum- 
ble place but if more women would make a 
study of their kitchens and then take thought, 
it is likely that the rest of their houses would 
be in much better taste. A thing that is use- 
ful, even as with some well-worn homely old 
woman who has led a good and helpful life, 
always acquires a beauty of its own. It may 
be hard for girls to see this but it i3 there, and 
in time it will be seen. Just as it is essen- 
tially more beautiful to have a clean, strong 
body rather than a pretty face and a body 
[49] 



A GirV s Student Days and After 

that is not what it ought to be, so is it more 
truly beautiful to have articles of furnishing 
in our rooms, in study or kitchen, that are of 
indispensable genuine use. 

Take the gaudy ambitious study one girl 
has made for herself. It is defaced by the 
presence of articles of no value at all in the 
world of needs ; there is nothing in it that is 
genuinely beautiful and nothing that is sub- 
stantially useful. The furniture is almost too 
cheap to stand on its own legs, and the col- 
ours would certainly never wash and not 
even wear. This room is a junk-shop of 
new, useless, unattractive objects of no 
virtue, — in short, a most unpleasant place 
in which to live. Have you ever considered 
what gives even the simplest clothes for dis- 
tinctive occasions a beauty of their own ? It 
is fitness. And it is this same fitness which 
tells so much in furnishing a room. It might 
be said of certain dresses that they " go to- 
gether," that is, they are harmonious, they 
belong together, they have, like some people, 

[50] 



The Stude7tt'* s Roo 



m 



the beauty of agreeing with themselves, and 
a very desirable sort of beauty it is. Just as 
clothes are an expression of the people who 
wear them, so are rooms an expression of the 
people who live in them. No well-bred girl 
cares for tawdry, cheap, over-ornamented 
clothes. She is made uncomfortable even at 
the very thought of having to wear such 
things. She should suffer just as much dis- 
comfort on the score of a cheaply furnished 
(and by " cheap " here I do not mean inex- 
pensive — whitewash and deal intelligently 
used may create a beautiful room), over- 
crowded and over-ornamented study. 

What is the meaning of the room which is 
your school centre for the time being ? It is 
an intimate place where a girl may have her 
friends and good times ; it is a retreat and it 
is a workshop. It is the girl's home centre 
away from home, the place from v/hich she 
will lead her life, in its expression attractive 
or unattractive, like her or unlike her. To 
intend that this room in beauty, in cleanli- 

[51] 



yl Girfs Student Days and After 

ness, in order, shall be the best expression 
possible of the girl's best self is the ideal to 
set for the school study. 

Get good materials and good colours. 
They need not be expensive. Remember 
that colours have to go together just as 
furniture has to do so. To have styles of 
furniture that clash or colours that do not 
harmonize will negative any care which the 
student may have taken in the selection of 
individual pieces or materials. To have too 
much with which to fill the room is a good 
deal worse than not to have enough. Much 
better it is to have a few things which are 
just what they should be than to have too 
many and those undesirable. To get a desk, 
if a girl can afford to do so, that she will be 
glad to keep her life long is a good begin- 
ning, and a comfortable chair that will be 
made doubly precious by all the school as- 
sociations woven about it. And let her be 
careful about pictures for her walls and not 
crowd them with cheap and "fashionable" 

[52] 



The Student'* s Roo 



m 



trash. Above all, let her remember that 
good taste, simplicity, careful selection, will 
do more to assure her the possession of an 
attractive room than all the money in the 
world can do. 



[53] 



V 
THE TOOLS OF STUDY AND THEIR USE 

A GIRL ought to take up her study 
with the same sense of pleasure as 
that with which a strong workman 
enters his shop, knowing his tools and able 
to use them. Having good tools and know- 
ing them is certainly part of the joy of work. 
And what are the tools the student must use ? 
Well, for the average student, the one that is 
first and most important is Good Health. 
The mind is not as clear if the body is not in 
good health, clean within and without. 

The second set of tools consists of a differ- 
ent sort of equipment and apparatus, tools 
with which a girl must become familiar and 
which she must know how to use — Books, 
Library^ Laboratory and Classroom. Why 
shouldn't a student be just as able to use her 
books as a carpenter his plane or saw ? One 
couldn't expect a fumbling carpenter or a 

[54] 



The Tools of Study and Their Use 

clumsy seamstress to accomplish much work 
or good work. There are times when a girl 
need not claim to know anything but she 
must, at least, know where to find what she 
wants to know. This is the first lesson in the 
use of books ; without knowledge of them or 
love for them, the student can't get along at 
all. And beyond this somewhat mechanical 
use of books there is a deeper and larger 
lesson to learn ; to know that a book is not 
merely a page of print where information 
may be sought but that it is a mirror in 
which one finds the world, its wisdom, its joy, 
its sorrow, its divine adventures. Robert 
Southey, the friend of the poet Coleridge, has 
written beautifully on the subject in a little 
poem called " His Books." 

Another tool in the student's workshop is 
Previously Acquired Knowledge : that is, 
what one has in one's mind. Some people's 
minds are junk-shops. But a junk-shop is 
better than an empty shop. This previously 
acquired knowledge, if used rightly, becomes 
[55] 



A Girr s Student Days and After 

the tool of later courses, the servant of later 
years. Our stored-up facts — many of them 
— ^have not been an end in themselves. How 
could they be ? For example, such things as 
paradigms and formulae and long lists of 
names and dates, are tools pure and simple ; 
but the student in the workshop must have 
them or she will be like a carpenter who had 
much to do but on coming to his bench 
found no tools there and so was idle all day. 
A fourth tool for the girl in her study— one 
that cannot be deliberately acquired, as in- 
formation or apparatus or even health can 
be — is Experience. This is the most valuable 
tool of all — one's experience of travel, with 
people, in responsibility, in love, in joy, in 
sorrow, in any kind of work. The girls who 
are the most interesting in the classroom are 
the girls who are not contenting themselves 
with apparatus alone but whose minds are 
flexible with experience, who bring all of 
themselves, their life, to bear upon the work. 
A certain well-known minister had prepared 

[56] 



The Tools of Study aitd Their Use 

a sermon for his usual Sunday engagement, 
but half an hour before service another text 
came into his mind. He could not forget it, 
so he jotted down notes and preached the 
new sermon instead of the one that had been 
prepared. This sermon made a great im- 
pression on all v/ho heard it, and the minister 
himself said of it that some people would de- 
clare that it had been thought out in half an 
hour, but that really he had put fifty years 
of his life into it. The sharper and better the 
tools, the finer the character of the work. 
If experience has been observed and retained, 
and previously acquired knowledge is ready 
for service, and hand and mind know how 
to use books, and the student is in good 
condition physically, then the excellence of 
that girl's work in the class and out can be 
guaranteed. 

And now what are the uses of the work 
which these tools can accomplish for us? 
Coleridge wrote in his poem, '' Work With- 
out Hope," 

[57] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

" Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, 
And Hope without an object cannot live." 

The only hope that can last is hope that is 
not wholly centred in ourselves, but has some 
thought for others and our service to them. 
Work devoid of inspiration and ideals, work 
done merely for one's self, study pursued 
with only a degree as an end or for the sake 
of ** pay" as a teacher, turns school and 
college into a market-place, a place of barter, 
where in exchange for so much energy and 
so much money we may acquire a certain 
position and livelihood. Only that work in 
which one has the consciousness of being, or 
becoming, useful to others, brings joy that 
will endure. What do we think of the 
minister who is without a sense of consecra- 
tion? The responsibility of the student or 
the teacher is quite as large, the opportunity 
for service quite as wonderful. One of our 
greatest English poets, William Wordsworth, 
exclaimed : ** I wish to be considered as a 
teacher, or as nothing ! " The calling of the 

[58] 



The Tools of Study and Their Use 

teacher, of the student, has through all time 
been thought a high one, — one that has drawn 
to itself fine and unselfish spirits. The life of 
the student, no matter how necessary to the 
world its market-places are, never has been 
and never can be a life of barter, of trade. 

The wealth that comes to the student 
should not be an exclusive possession. It 
may be bought at a large price but it can 
never be sold. It must be given away, oi 
shared, for it is wealth which carries with it a 
sense of social responsibility. It is enjoyed 
for a double purpose, not only for the sake 
of the happiness it brings to us but also for 
the sake of the joy or help it may bring to 
others. Millions of girls covet the opportuni- 
ties that come to a few in school and college, 
many of them who far more greatly deserve 
this privilege than we. Indeed, what have 
most of us done to merit the right to all that 
we have ? The only way in which we can 
show our sense of justice is by taking our 
privileges as something to share with others. 
[59] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

The girl who has health, pleasant surround- 
ings and work worth doing, has all a human 
being has a right to expect. She ought 
always to be happy, always rejoicing in her 
work and always eager to divide her wealth 
with others. 

The redeeming feature of royalties has 
been their sense of responsibility for their 
subjects ! In great disasters, or calamities, 
their first thought has been to go to the relief 
of the people. The King and Queen of Italy 
are noble examples of this courage and unself- 
ishness. In America the only "■ privileged '' 
class is the highly educated. It is they 
from whom noblesse oblige must be expected, 
who will show in all emergencies their sense 
of responsibility, who will share all that they 
have with others. A girl will be happy, she 
will grow, she will be a leverage power for 
good with those among whom she lives, only 
in so far as she uses her tools of knowledge 
in the service of others, and shapes all that 
she does towards some humanly useful end. 

[60] 



VI 

THE JOY OF WORK 

IF one is in good condition, the exercise 
of any physical power is a pleasure. It 
is a pleasure to run, to sing, to dance, 
to climb mountains, to row, to swim ; it is a 
pleasure to shout for nothing else than for 
the pure joy of letting off surplus energy. 
In the world of animals, the horse and dog, 
to take only two illustrations, abound in this 
enjoyment of physical energy. The horse 
paws the ground and snorts and whinnies 
and loves the fastest road pace you will let 
him take. The dog leaps in the air, jumps 
fences, barks, and races around madly, some- 
times after nothing at all. 

But the highest power of which human 
beings are possessed is not the power of the 
body. It is the power of the mind. Yet 
many of us throughout our school and 
college life not only do not wish to use this 
[6i] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

power but even rebel against it. '' What," 
some girls are saying to themselves, " enjoy 
the work of a classroom ? Who ever heard 
of such a thing!" Yes, just that. And 
if we don't enjoy the work of a classroom, 
even an indifferently good one, there is 
something the matter with us, or the sub- 
ject should not have a place on any cur- 
riculum. Every mental exercise should be 
full of the keenest pleasure, of intellectual 
pleasure. 

Our schools and colleges to-day are very 
much richer in the joy of everything else — 
in beautiful surroundings, in freer and fuller 
athletic and outdoor life, in a more varied 
and delightful social life — than they were 
fifty or even twenty-five years ago. But it is 
a question whether the joy of intellectual 
work has kept pace with this joy of life in its 
other aspects. Sometimes it almost seems as 
if intellectual eagerness were in inverse ratio 
to the ease and fullness of the opportunities 
we have* At least many fair-minded girls 

[62] 



The Joy of Work 



have seen the predicament in which the 
teacher is placed. The man who makes a 
vase for the use and pleasure of others may 
rejoice not only in his own workmanship but 
also in the thought of the service and delight 
he is giving to others. That is, his pleasure 
is twofold. The teacher who is deprived of 
some response of joy in the work he is doing 
is a workman deprived of his rights. To 
those girls who are thinking of becoming 
teachers this should be a sobering thought. 

Missionary teachers, with their students 
eager to get anything they have to give, are 
not to be pitied. Our schools and their 
groups of teachers in isolated and uncul- 
tivated parts of the West and South are not 
to be pitied. Even if education is with them 
shorn of much that gives it charm, the oppor- 
tunities that come are prized. Students and 
teachers have intellectual joy in the work 
they do, and without that the greatest uni- 
versity in the world might as well, or better, 
be a district school, for then the work done 

[63] 



A GirTs Student Days and After 

would be truly useful. It is the teacher who 
has to put much of her time and energy into 
making a subject superficially attractive 
enough for a student to elect it, who is to be 
pitied. A classroom full of blase girls whose 
minds need to be tickled before there is the 
least expression of intellectual mirth upon 
their faces, is an ordeal not lightly to be met 
except by the professional joker or academic 
tumbler. 

Girls often become impatient with them- 
selves, and that is one reason why there is so 
little joy in work for them. Think of Helen 
Keller as a famous example of this joy in 
work under the most adverse circumstances. 
What could be greater than her handicap ? 
Shut away from the world by deaf ears and 
blind eyes and, for a while, by inability to 
speak, she has nevertheless shown a keenness 
of pleasure and intellectual acquisition that 
shames us who have all our senses in their 
fullness. Think of her patient, unremitting 
delving, of the digging up, up, up to get to 
[64] 



The yoy of Wor^k 



the light which most human beings are privi- 
leged to enjoy with no effort at all I The 
mind that accepts this wealth with no 
thought, no sense of responsibility, is a trifler 
with riches that are about us for God-given 
purposes. Think of the way in which Steven- 
son and John Richard Green and George 
Eliot rose above their ill-health and did their 
work in despite of it ! Perhaps some of us 
have superb health and have never made any 
conscious effort to use that gift for a high 
end. 

Girls grow impatient with themselves when 
they wouldn't be impatient with a little child. 
Yet the mind has to be trained even as we 
train a child ; it has to be brought back and 
back, again and again to the thing to be 
done. After the asking of a simple question, 
oftentimes a whole class will look confounded, 
because they have some strange notion that 
thinking means getting hold of something 
very far away and difBcult to grasp. All 
that the first effort in thought denotes is 
[65] 



A GirVs Student Days and After 

taking a hold of that which is nearest and 
following it up. It is the old story of 
Theseus following his clue of thread, the 
slender thing in his hand, by which he was 
guided out of the labyrinth and to the broad 
sea of adventure. 

There are difficulties in the doing of any 
work that is worth while. It would be a 
poor adviser who painted the student's way 
as a path of roses. First and foremost, one's 
own inertia interferes with the joy of work. 
Some one has defined the lazy man as one 
who doesn't want to do anything at all, and 
the indolent man as one who doesn't want to 
do anything that he doesn't want to do. 
Then, too, there are certain allurements and 
distractions in school life which are a hin- 
drance to our joy in an intellectual task. And 
there is the very natural disinclination to the 
drudgery involved in all hard labour. No 
work that is worth while is without drudgery. 
Lack of encouragement from older people is 
one serious difficulty some girls have to meet. 
[66] 



The jfoy of Work 



There is a type of older person who is sure 
that using the mind will harm that precious 
article. And, finally, there is our inexperi- 
ence, our own lack of comprehension, our 
own purposeless and formless lives. 

Joy in work should not be altogether con- 
ditional upon one's sense of ease or upon 
what is called success. Seeming success is 
not always success. Often the most valuable 
lessons come from failures, Robert Brown- 
ing, the poet, speaks again and again of the 
noble uses of failure. Let me quote one 
stanza from one of his greatest poems, *' Rabbi 
Ben Ezra" : 

" Then, welcome each rebuff 
That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go I 
Be our joys three-parts pain ! 
Strive and hold cheap the strain ; 
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never 
grudge the throe ! " 

You can't learn to walk if you haven't tumbled 
down a good deal in doing it. It is often 
failure that means ultimate success. Of 

[67] 



A GirTs Student Days and After 

course if a girl keeps on saying : "Oh, 
what's the use ? '* about everything she does 
and all her failures, there isn't any use. In 
weak moments that sort of thing can be said 
of every great and worth-while experience, of 
love, of joy, of sorrow, of work. But a girl 
who allows herself to take this attitude is a 
*' quitter," and doesn't know the first prin- 
ciples of playing the game. 

Part of the joy of work consists in the mere 
delight of intellectual exercise, delight in 
thinking a thing out. That is the way 
we develop ourselves mentally, just as we 
develop ourselves physically through sports. 
The mind that thinks is capable of deeper 
and broader thinking. Thinking begets 
thought. A muscle that is left without exer- 
cise softens and finally atrophies. The same 
is true of mental muscle. If this strength is 
left unused it is gradually lost and cannot 
be recovered. Mental concentration, the 
thought that is so strenuous that everything 
else is shut out, strengthens the mind. In 
[68] 



The yoy of Work 



this wonderful old world no new land has 
been discovered without physical effort. 
There is no country of the mind which can 
be entered without a similar effort. 

And there is another and very important 
joy in work — the sense that one is being 
equipped for the work of the world, for use- 
fulness. The mere feeling that one's powers 
are being developed brings joy with it. 
There is still another joy which every one of 
us must covet— the sense of entering into the 
intellectual riches of the world, its wonders of 
science and art and letters, with the feeling 
that we have a part in a great treasure, a 
treasure which, unlike gold and precious 
stones, men have never been able to gauge 
or to exhaust. Such gold and silver as we 
take from that adventure cannot be lost or 
stolen from us. It remains with us to the 
very last, and with it no life can ever become 
really poor, or dull, or old. 



[69] 



VII 

FAIR-PLAY 

FEW students realize how closely a class- 
room resembles a commonwealth. To 
most of us it seems a place into which 
we go to have a certain amount got out of 
us, or put into us. This conception of the 
classroom is unworthy the modern girl who 
has, otherwise, a fine understanding of the 
meaning of team-play, of playing all together 
for a common end, a game or a republic 
united by a tacit compact. 

Does the average student feel responsi- 
bility for the game of basket-ball or lawn 
hockey which she is playing? The first 
thought of the girl in answering this is that 
it was a foolish question even to ask. Of 
course she does. But for her classroom? 
No, that is a different sijrt of game, in which 
the responsibility lies all on the shoulders of 
the instructor. It is a one-woman or a one- 

[70] 



Fair- PI 



ay 



man game, and very often the students are 
but spectators, cheering or indifferent, ap- 
proving or disapproving. The pupil does 
not hold herself accountable for this game ; 
it is the teacher who makes the class ** go,'* 
who extracts from each student the informa- 
tion bottled up in her, together, often, with a 
good deal of carbon dioxide, — -a process dif- 
ficult and hard as drawing a swollen cork 
out of a soda-water bottle. Finally, with a 
sort of noble rebound of effort, the exhausted 
instructor is to put a vast deal of information 
back into the girl before the student claps 
her book together and rushes pell-mell to 
the next classroom, there to be similarly un- 
corked, if the teacher has learned the art and 
her mental muscle is sufficient. 

Such a conception of a classroom is not 
fair-play. The teacher, like the coxswain of a 
college crew, may have rowed over the same 
course and she may know it well enough to 
cover it in the dark ; she may have won dis- 
tinction upon it, may be the fittest person in 

[71] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

all the states of the Union to cover it again, 
but if she has not a good or a winning crew 
to coach, she will never win any race, even 
the shortest. No instructor has shoulders 
equal to such a multiple burden as coaching, 
steering and doing all the rowing, too. To 
play any classroom game in this spirit is to 
be dead weight for every one else embarked 
upon the same adventure. It is not fair-play. 
By such an attitude on the part of merely 
one student in the class, every other student 
associated with her loses, for the girl who 
will not lift her own weight the others must 
carry. If that student were playing in that 
spirit on the basket-ball team, do you sup- 
pose that the coach, or the captain, would let 
her stay on ? Not for a moment ; off she 
would go and very much humiliated, too. If 
it is a discussion, the touch and go of the 
whole recitation will depend upon the pres- 
ence of the team-play, or fair-play, spirit in 
the course. The instructor may do her best 
but if there is no play-the-game in that class- 

[72] 



Fair- P lay 



room, she might just as well fold up her tent, 
like the proverbial Arab, ** and silently steal 
away." It is not that any recitation need be 
a brilliant affair — if most of them depended 
upon that for existence they would scarcely 
exist at all— but there must be an honest, 
earnest, responsible eflort to make the best 
of the hour. Good will inevitably come from 
the clarifying efiort to express thought, and 
the leading from thought to thought as the 
work goes forward. 

The basket-ball team cannot win, or even 
play, unless all the members are playing to- 
gether. Each one is needed despite the fact 
that she may not be one of the chief or best 
players. Just so does the class need all its 
students. If a girl is only average, it is not 
fair-play for her to sit back and do nothing ; 
neither is it fair-play for her to monopolize 
the attention if she happens to be more than 
commonly able. It is not fair-play to laugh 
at the girl who is at a disadvantage, or to 
appear bored. It is unfair to the individual, 
[73] 



A GirTs Student Days and After 

to the classroom in general and to the in- 
structor. The least she can do in this class 
game is to give her whole and her courteous 
attention. 

Think of all the practice games in which 
the average athletic team takes part. What 
can be said for the student who comes into 
the classroom unprepared to lift her own 
weight, unprepared to help others? When 
one comes to think about it from the fair- 
play point of view there is nothing to be said 
for her. Nor is it fair-play for a girl to allow 
herself to get into such a state physically 
that she is unable to study. How often and 
often have fudge-heads — due to an applica- 
tion to too much sugar and not to books — 
sitting row after row killed a school or even 
a whole college ! Before a class tempered 
by fudge and not by wholesome outdoor liv- 
ing and conscientious devotion to work, the 
teacher might better put away her notes and 
close her book. Nothing can happen through 
or over that barricade of fudge-heads. 

[74] 



Fair- P lay 



And it is not fair-play to cram because of 
time lost, or for any other cause. The only 
end of cramming is that the student soon 
forgets all that has been learned. Alone by 
normal, slow acquisition and all the associa- 
tions formed in such learning can informa- 
tion come to us to stay. It may not be 
particularly wicked to cram if one has plenty 
of time to waste, but it is foolish unless one 
has. 

There is a kind of gossip in which a girl 
takes part, made up of snap-shot judg- 
ments of the classroom, idle carping about 
some litde unimportant point, expression of 
wounded vanity and unfair talk, which may 
mean a tremendous loss of prestige for a 
really admirable course; it may mean that 
girls, who would naturally go into it because 
of their liking or gift for the work, do not go 
or go in a critical and unsympathetic atti- 
tude. If there is a complaint to be made 
about any course it should be made to the 
responsible person concerned, and that is 
[75] 



A GirFs Student Days and After 

usually the teacher. Anything else is not 
fair- play. In the classroom the instructor is 
the ** coach '* of the game and she is the per- 
son with whom to talk. It is needless to say 
that if a girl is putting nothing into a course 
she cannot expect to get anything out of it, or 
to complain because things do not " go." 
If she wants them to " go " why does she not 
help, and have the profit of taking something 
away from the work as interest on her effort ? 
A girl gets dividends only from work into 
which she has put some brain-capital. 

And the people at home ? Is it fair-play 
to them, when they are making sacrifices of 
money or of happiness to keep the daughter 
at school, for her not to put good work into 
her study and play her part faithfully in the 
classroom game? So many things have to 
be taken into consideration of which we are 
not likely to think. There is the girl her- 
self, the other girls with whom she is work- 
ing, the instructor, the people at home, the 
institution that is providing an expensive 
[76] 



Fair- P lay 



equipment or plant through the philanthropic 
efforts of others or the taxation of the public. 
If the girl does not play her part fairly, there 
is a rather big reckoning against her, is there 
not? 



[77] 



VIII 
THE RIGHT SORT OF LEISURE 

THE right sort of leisure ought to help 
as much in the development of the 
girl as the right sort of work. If it 
is leisure worthy the name, it will bring 
refreshment ; it will not leave one physically 
and mentally jaded. Neither mind nor body 
should ever be exhausted because of the way 
in which freedom has been used. Leisure is 
as important to work as work is to leisure. A 
person who has not worked cannot appreciate 
freedom, while the one who has had no 
leisure is not best fitted for work. " All 
work and no play makes Jack a dull boy ; " 
it is just as true that it makes Jill a dull girl. 
The girl who works all the time, not realizing 
the importance of free moments, becomes 
fagged in body and mind. She is a tool that 
is dull, and would do well to remember that 
even a machine is better for an occasional rest* 

[78] 



The Right Sort of Leisure 

Some mistaken ideas about leisure have 
grown up, making it difficult to say anything 
on this subject without being misunder- 
stood. Stories — whole books of them — 
about ** spreads " and more or less lawless 
escapades in school and college, have given 
girls and other people, too, the impression 
that this is the sort of thing school leisure is. 
Nothing could be farther from the truth. 
Midnight feasts may occur in school, and 
most of us, unless we are too good to be 
average girls, have taken part in them. But 
such stories are vicious, for they misrepre- 
sent the life by suggesting that eating inferior 
and unwholesome food is the real freedom 
most girls desire. There is something repul- 
sive in the very thought. Feasts that leave 
a girl with a coated tongue and a dull head 
and Monday "blues " do not fairly represent 
school or college leisure. Good times that 
interfere with good work have no place in 
ideally free hours. But, indeed, the odours 
from the chafing-dishes do suggest that some 

[79] 



A GirV s Student Days and After 

of the girls are trying to put into literal ex- 
ecution the wish of a great German professor 
in Oxford. The professor, eager to try a dish 
he saw on the hotel bill of fare, but with his 
English and German verbs not quite disen- 
tangled, said to the waiter, " Hereafter I vish 
to become a Velsh Rabbit." Perhaps be- 
coming a Welsh rarebit represents the height 
of some girls' ideals, but this is hard to be- 
lieve. 

The possession of leisure depends to a 
great extent upon the will power. The girl 
who has never learned to say *' No," who has 
no power of selection, cannot expect to have 
any hours for her own use. She is quarry 
for every idle suggestion, every social en- 
gagement, every executive '* job " which 
pursues her. The girl who engages all her 
time socially cannot have a sense of leisure, 
for she turns her playtime into but another 
schedule, to be met as inexorably as her 
academic courses. Her days become a for- 
midable array of "dates," often stretching 
[80] 



The Right Sort of Lieisure 

ahead for weeks. Even if girls are not de- 
termined to have it for themselves, they 
should give to others some opportunity for 
freedom, and should respect their possible 
desire for solitude. The girl who engages 
or annexes every particle of time, her own or 
that of some one else with whom she comes 
in contact, is making leisure an impossibility. 
The girl who leaves no margin cannot hope 
for even the spirit of freedom. 

Many students excuse themselves for much 
executive work in school and college on the 
ground that it is done in their leisure. That 
girl is a goose who allows herself through 
any sense of self-importance, or irreplaceable 
usefulness, to be so involved in executive 
work that all other aspects of her school life 
are slighted. If she refuses to be swamped 
by such "jobs*' she can have the happiness 
of reflecting that probably some girls who 
need the training far more than she does are 
doing the work. To every girl will come the 
opportunity right along for ** managing " ; 
[8l] 



A Girl' s Student Days and After 

club and social work will bring it, and a good- 
sized family will bring it as nothing else can. 
But school leisure she will not have again. 
The whole aim of the school is to enrich the 
lives of its students, and it knows all too well 
that that student who does not keep for herself 
the leisure upon which body and mind and 
soul must feed is indeed poor. 

There is one way in which leisure is very 
generally misspent in school— and alas, out- 
side, too ! — not in managing one's own af- 
fairs, but in managing and discussing the 
affairs of others. At such times the remarks 
may be superlatively pleasant, but they are 
more often superlatively disagreeable. It 
may be said with truthfulness that they are 
almost never moderate or just. Everything 
is all black or all white, with no gray. It 
makes one think of the little girl with a curl 
in the middle of her forehead : 

" When she was good, she was very, very good, 
And when she was bad, she was horrid." 

But, alas ! the poor wretches discussed are not 

[82] 



The Right Sort of Leisure 

allowed even the natural and somewhat happy 
human alternation between badness and good- 
ness. No, indeed, they are monsters of a 
desperate character— they may at the mo- 
ment be broken-heartedly conscious of their 
own faults — or they are shining six- winged 
angels. And, woe I this sort of thing comes 
almost as hard upon the angels. They can't 
endure it ; so much goodness breaks down 
their wing arches, and the glorious ones 
crumple together like tissue-paper. 

And upon the girls busily engaged in 
creating angels of loveliness and gargoyles 
of ugliness, this sort of conversation works 
havoc. It does not invigorate them, it does 
not inspire them. It belittles their minds- 
thank fortune, that making kindling wood of 
the characters of other people does do this ! 
— and stunts their finer feelings. This sin, 
that they *^ do by two and two," they pay for 
one by one. Gentle and considerate feelings 
are lost, time is wasted, a vicious habit, — al- 
most no habit is more vicious,— is acquired. 

[83] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

Such gossip can never become a pure enjoy- 
ment ; it remains at the best an ignoble, dis- 
creditable excitement. Rolling these sweet 
morsels under their tongues, a taste for ill- 
natured or exaggerated comment fixes itself 
in their mouths. Even if they have con- 
sciences that, like good mothers, will occasion- 
ally wash their mouths out with soap, they 
retain the disturbing memory of unkind, 
coarse, or foolish words. 

Yet school should be the last place in 
which to indulge in idle talk. Such indul- 
gence is against all the idealism of student 
life. Idle or meddlesome talk never helps 
any one, either the one who talks or the one 
who is discussed. If you have anything to 
say about other people, and if going to them 
will help you, the only friendly thing to do- 
it is not an easy thing — is to speak to the 
people concerned. If we really knew how to 
put ourselves in other people's places, no un- 
kind, unfriendly words would ever be spoken 
again. There would be things hard to bear 
[84] 



The Right Sort of Ljeisure 

said — rebuke or reproof are never easy to re- 
ceive — but nothing unfriendly. Think how 
idle, ill-natured talk flows around the world, 
and then think what a different world it 
would be if there were none of it ! It is to 
human life what the blights, the scales, the 
insect pests are to tree and flower. Fortu- 
nately, as people grow older they come to 
think themselves less infallible, and as they 
grow wiser they become more tender and 
more lenient in their judgments. 

In companionship whose leisure interests 
are good there is a sense of freedom filled full 
and running over, of minds and hearts doubly 
rich, of good times doubly jolly. But on the 
whole, girls have too little absolute solitude ; 
there is scarcely a girl in twenty, except the 
" dig," who is alone at all. One trouble with 
dormitory school life is that it fosters leisure- 
wasting and time-wasting "gang" habits. 
A girl so surrounded never wants to be alone 
a moment, either indoors or out. With such, 
the blessing and blessedness of solitude should 

[85] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

be learned, for solitude rightly used makes 
strong men and women. 

The woman who has leisure has a grasp 
upon time, is master of it instead of being 
mastered by it. It is the girl whirled around 
in a squirrel cage of pointless weekly and 
Sunday engagements who is oppressed and 
mastered by her lack of freedom. And then 
there is the hard-pressed future ; we must lay 
up some leisure for that. The time when 
one is most hurried is the time when one 
most needs the sense of freedom. The story 
of the old Quaker lady who had so much to 
do she didn't know where to begin, and so 
took a nap, is profoundly full of wisdom. 
When the old lady woke up she found she 
had plenty of time after all, not because she 
had done anything but because she had 
come again into a leisurely frame of mind. 

Leisure means neither a blank mind nor 

an empty hand. It means a holiday taken 

with an eager mind, with eyes keen in their 

delight and knowledge, with hands capable 

[86] 



The Right Sort of Leisure 

of some beauty or some use. All of us have 
leisure to think, but not ail of us think. 
Some of us, if friends come in unexpectedly, 
will quickly pick up something and pretend 
to be busy. When Watt sat by the fire 
watching the steam from the teakettle lift 
the lid, he was not precisely idle. The 
powerful, indispensable steam-engine was 
the result. One reason, aside from all re- 
ligious considerations, why we need a quiet 
Sunday, is that we may have that sense of 
freedom which feeds mind and body, and 
even the crumbs of whose profitableness 
have made the world rich in great inven- 
tions, in great pictures, in wonderful books. 



[87] 



IX 

THE OUTDOOR RUNWAY 

AFTER Nebuchadnezzar came in from 
eating grass there had taken place 
in that potentate a great change for 
the good. One of the factors in this better- 
ment may have been the grass itself. The 
grass-cure has always been popular and 
always will be, for it is just as good for the 
tired mind as it is for the tired body. 
Nowadays every big school and every 
college provide a grass-cure for students 
who are out at elbows with their nerve 
sleeves, or who have not sufficient muscle to 
make them fit, or who are overworking or 
need toning up in any way. There is more 
and more recognition of the fact that a 
school course which is taken at the expense 
of health is not worth having. And side by 
side with this wholesome admission has come 
a great awakening in the last fifteen years to 
[88] 



The Outdoor Runway 



the curative value of the outdoor runwayy 
whether that runway be a field track, 
energetic walking in a park or campus, or a 
cross country run. 

Some girls — and there are more girls of 
this type than there are boys — put in their 
outdoor life as a stop-gap. It is inconceiv- 
able that this should be true, yet it is true. 
Apathetically the students have exercised 
sixty minutes, considering this minimum 
quite sufficient. Not a particle of zest do 
they reveal in the exercise taken. They do 
not seem to know or they do not care that 
the fields and woods should be full, not only 
of health and all that goes with it, including 
success, but also of the best of friends who 
all have their good points worthy of notice 
and imitation, in quick leap, cheerful voice 
and blithe song. What are sixty minutes in 
this great outdoor runway ? Not a tithe of 
the twenty-four hours and at best only half 
of what the minimum should be. Exercise 
should be taken even if nothing else in the 

[89] 



A GirTs Student: Days and After 

school life is. And I say this advisedly, for 
health is the basis on which not only the 
future of the woman's life must depend but 
also that of the race. Good health, the in- 
heritance of it, its maintenance and increase, 
neither the girl nor her parents can ever hold 
as too sacred a trust. That it is a sacred 
trust the schools are recognizing more and 
more, and provisions are being made, espe- 
cially in the public schools, for the defective 
in health as well as for the strong. The out- 
door school, at first an object that attracted 
universal attention, is now being taken quite 
for granted. Foolish the girl who does not 
learn to take the outdoor runway for granted, 
too, and go out to it in high spirits to learn 
its wisdom, to take part in its joys and to 
receive its health. 

It may be accepted as a new axiom— the 
more exercise the less fool. Strong, able 
muscles, steady nerves (and let us remember 
that nerves depend for their tone on the 
muscular condition), a clean skin open at all 

[90] 



The Outdoor Runway 

its pores and doing its eliminative work 
thoroughly, and clean strong vitals make up 
the kind of beauty within the reach of all 
womanhood, and the physical beauty which 
she should most desire. The day is coming 
when our ideal of what is physically perfect 
—not spiritually, for Christianity has carried 
us beyond anything that Greece ever knew 
— will be more like the Greek in its entirety, 
its emphasis upon the harmony of the whole 
body. The body is a mechanism to be ex- 
quisitely cared for— self-running, it is true, 
and yet in need of intelligent attention. 
Think of the care an engineer gives his 
engine, and it is by no manner of means so 
wonderfully and so intricately fashioned as 
these bodies of ours on which our happiness, 
our working ability, even our very goodness 
depend. Health as a safeguard to one's 
whole moral being is coming into more and 
more recognition, and not only as a safe- 
guard but also as a cultivator of all that is 
best in us spiritually. There are people very 
[91] 



A Girl's Student Days and After 

ill, or permanent invalids, whose great victory- 
it is to be among the saints of the earth, but 
that it is easier to be good when one is well 
no one will deny. Every big school has now 
its class or classes in corrective or medical 
gymnastics, in which stooping shoulders, 
ewe necks, curved spines, flat insteps, small 
waists and narrow chests are rectified as far 
as possible in the limited hours of the school 
days. 

The time is coming when parents will con- 
sider it a disgrace to allow their children to 
be physically undeveloped. The physician, 
always in advance of the community for 
which he cares, sees how grave in moral or 
intellectual import physical defects may be. 
The educational world, alive to new messages 
for the reconstruction of its educational ideal, 
begins also to place more and more emphasis 
upon the physical care and development of 
its students— and not by any manner of means 
for physical reasons only but because the 
whole girl or the whole boy is better spirit- 

[92] 



The Outdoor Runway 

ually and mentally for having a body that is 
strong and well. The whole being keeps 
better time, just as a watch does, for having 
clean works. No one has the right to shut out 
the fresh air or the sunshine ; no girl should 
remain undeveloped physically through lack 
of exercise when she could, through exercise, 
make herself strong. Even to abuse her feet, 
the important centre of many important 
nerves, by tight shoes, is wrong ; so is it to 
rack her spine and upset or throw out of 
position all the delicate and wonderfully 
fashioned organs of the abdominal cavity by 
the wearing of high French heels. Un- 
doubtedly, however, American motherhood 
and girlhood represent something more and 
more intelligent ; indeed, in physical culture 
women are beginning to keep step with men, 
and it is upon this fact that school and col- 
lege depend in their splendid efforts to make 
the sum of feminine vitality, despite the pres- 
sure of modern civilization, plus rather than 
minus. 

[93] 



A GirPs Student Days ajtd After 

The 7nore exercise the less fool ; and it is 
worth remembering that the daily exercise, 
the plunge into cool or clean air, as well as 
the plunge into water, is a wit sharpener, and 
will do more for a student in the long run 
than " digging " possibly can. Mens sana 
in corpore sano may be an old saying but it is 
still new enough to be repeated with vigour to 
certain people. Let us get out-of-doors and 
have our wits sharpened and see more, and do 
more, and be more ! No one can perma- 
nently starve her whole body for the want of 
fresh air and exercise, which are the body's 
birthright, and expect to have a clear head or 
do well-balanced and helpful work in the home, 
or in school, or in some wage-earning career. 
If the girl attempt this impossibility she will 
be like the frog which jumped up one foot 
and fell back two. She will get to the bottom 
soon enough, the bottom of the class or the 
bottom of her health account, but she will 
never get to the top of anything. Any suc- 
cess, if by chance it should come to her, rest- 

[94] 



The Outdoor Runway 

ing on a basis of ill health or indifference to 
her physical fitness for living and working, 
will be like the house built upon the sands. 
Before the girl is twenty, before she is twenty- 
five — the earlier the better — she should rec- 
ognize this fact and begin to estabUsh her 
life on the bed rock of health. 

It is true, too, ninety-nine times out of a 
hundred, that the country boy and the coun- 
try girl are more resourceful than their city 
cousins. Out-of-doors they have had to use 
their wits and have not been spoiled by all 
the appliances of city life. Out-of-doors, too, 
they have made invaluable friendships with 
bird and squirrel and rabbit and deer, friend- 
ships whose intelligent wood-life has taught 
them much. Self-reliance is one of the lessons 
of the outdoor runway ; and wisdom and in- 
spiration come from it when they are needed. 
About this truth the work of the poet Words- 
worth is one long poem. Again and again 
he writes of the perfect woman shaped by the 
influences of nature. Of her he says : 
[95] 



A Girl's Student Days and After 



" Three years she grew in sun and shower; 
Then Nature said, ^ A loveher flower 

On earth was never sown ; 
This child I to myself will take ; 
She shall be mine, and I will make 

A lady of my own. 

'' ' Myself will to my darling be 

Both law and impulse : and with me 

The girl in rock and plain, 
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 
Shall feel an overseeing power 

To kindle and restrain. 

*^ * She shall be sportive as the fawn 
That wild with glee across the lawn 

Or up the mountain springs ; 
And hers shall be the breathing balm, 
And hers the silence and the calm 

Of mute, insensate things. 

*' * The floating clouds their state shall lend 
To her ; for her the willow bend ; 

Nor shall she fail to see 
Even in the motions of the storm 
Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 

By silent sympathy. 

" ' The stars of midnight shall be dear 
To her; and she shall lean her ear 

In many a secret place 
Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
And beauty born of murmuring sound 

Shall pass into her face ! ' " 

No one can afford to neglect all the spirit- 

[96] 



The Outdoor Runway 



ual influence of nature, and the only way to 
receive it is to go to nature. Purity of mind, 
a clean conception of God's creative plan, a 
more active intellectual life are all there for 
the girl who will seek them. She cannot af- 
ford not to go back to nature for these helps, 
for every woman is in some sense a burden 
bearer, and she must needs know all she can 
of what life means in order to bear these 
burdens well. 

There are various kinds of outdoor life, 
some one of which is within reach of every 
human being, even if they are cripples. 
Probably most girls when the outdoor life of 
school and college is spoken of think that 
athletics is meant. That is one part of the 
outdoor runway, and since it is provided in 
every school, and insisted upon, but little 
about it need be said. It is doing its work 
with more and more inspiration, as the re- 
sponse to its ideals comes in. And it does 
something more in every well-equipped 
school than merely make a girl use her legs 
[97] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

and arms : it gives her a large, sane ideal of 
health and provides her with the means of 
keeping well. There is no more useful pro- 
fession for the woman seeking one that is 
useful as well as remunerative than physical 
culture. 

There is another aspect of the outdoor run- 
way of which less is said. I mean garden- 
ing, or the care of live stock of some kind, 
or bee culture. This is practical remuner- 
ative work which for the girl living at home 
and going to school should serve famously 
as a grass-cure ; it would keep her out-of- 
doors with profit to both her health and her 
purse. And then there is another kind of 
grass-cure : the outdoor life out-of-doors, to 
be taken in long country walks, in fishing 
expeditions, in picnics, in camping or wher- 
ever roads, hills, meadows and brooks lead. 
Finally, there is the outdoor life indoors. This 
life insists upon windows open to the air and 
open to the sunshine, and this life every one 
of us may have all the time. 

[98] 



X 

A GIRL'S SUMMER 

ANY girl who settles down to a summer 
with the idea of doing nothing, or in 
an aimless, not-knowing-what-to-do- 
next fashion, lessens her opportunities for 
pleasure. Pleasure is not idleness, although 
in the minds of a great many people who 
have not thought very much it is. The 
right sort of leisure is full of opportunities for 
doing interesting things. 

There are some girls who look upon their 
summers as an escape from the slavery of 
their school year. There are others who 
think of their summers as something to be 
endured until they can go back to the more 
or less selfish freedom of the school. Neither 
is the right way. The summer ought not to 
be an entirely frivolous season, neither ought 
it to be too workaday. If a girl has work to 
do, everything should be so arranged as not 
to deprive the vacation of its recreative side, 
[99] 



A Gt?^rs Student Days and After 

On the other hand the summer should be all 
the happier because of a definite object to be 
accomplished. Something is wrong with a 
girl unless she finds both summer and winter 
full of opportunity and pleasure. 

No one can possibly do all the delightful 
or useful things which may be done in a 
single summer. In these months there is 
opportunity for growth just as in the winter 
— perhaps more opportunity physically. And 
intellectually there is much to be seen and 
observed. For the girl who can, it is well to 
plan to be out-of-doors as much as possible. 
For some, there are opportunities for camping, 
for long walks, for gardening, to learn how 
to do certain physically useful things, to row, 
swim and ride. Only an extraordinary 
emergency would deprive a girl of all the out- 
of-door exercise which she needs. If she isn't 
able to be by the sea or in the mountains, in 
almost all cities there is opportunity for exer- 
cise and games. With a short car ride she 

can go to golf links, to tennis courts, into the 
[loo] 



A GirV s Summer 

country. In many semi-citified homes there 
is space for a girl to do some gardening, one 
of the most profitable of pleasures, good for 
the girl and good for the home. Many homes 
would be much more attractive if there were 
more of the garden spirit in them. But if 
there is no chance for this, there can always 
be physical culture, an opportunity to build 
one's self up in health, to live sanely and 
wisely, to get plenty of sleep, and to take 
corrective exercise. In physical culture a 
girl should find out what she most needs — al- 
most any gymnastic instructor in school or 
college would be glad to outline work — and 
then in ten or fifteen minute exercises develop 
herself along those lines. 

For the girl with means there is the chance 
for travel, a splendid opportunity to cultivate 
many virtues of which the young traveller 
seldom thinks : patience, adaptability, seeing 
the bright side of things. Travelling may be 
made a very important part of education. It 
is too bad that some people of limited horizon 

[lOl] 



A Girl's Student Days and After 

take it simply as a chance to aggrandize 
themselves, something to boast about and 
with which to bore their friends by repeated 
accounts of what they did '' abroad." The 
great Doctor Samuel Johnson, the compiler 
of the famous dictionary and author of 
*' Rasselas," heartily disliked young travellers, 
for, he said, "They go too raw to make any 
great remarks." Travelling, if it is what it 
should be, is an educational opening. In 
this way can be gained a background for 
history, for literature, for sociology, and a 
vivid and living knowledge of geography. 
Merely running about with a guide-book will 
not achieve these ends, although a guide- 
book is a very important asset : sympathy, 
trying to understand what one sees, will. 
Travelling takes away provincialism because 
it broadens the outlook. In a very real sense 
the world becomes one's home. 

The girl who is not able to move about or 
actually travel may travel in books. She 
should be ashamed to read what is harmful 
[ 102] 



A GirPs Summer 



or merely cheap, but further than that it may 
not much matter. Let her read the Little 
Books, if she wishes, and the Great Little 
Books. As surely as the magnet swings 
towards the pole will the Great Little Books 
take her to the Great Big Books. She will 
be drawn on and up in her reading, and will 
have cultivated a love for reading which is 
far more important than perfunctory knowl- 
edge of the classics. 

Just as any books that are good point 
towards books that are better, so should the 
good work of a girl's school year be turning 
her mind towards the future and her work as 
a mature woman. In the summer she has 
time to assimilate all she has done, to get her 
bearings, and to plan wisely for the year, or 
years, to come. For a girl of strong physique 
the summer vacation gives an opportunity to 
add towards what she is going to do even- 
tually ; to specialize in some line of work, to 
take a library, or scientific, course. Many 
girls, however, who wish to spend their sum- 
[103] 



A GirVs Student Days and After 

mer in this fashion ought not to consider it, 
for they are not strong enough. It is well for 
them to remember that it is the quality of 
work that counts rather than the quantity. 
Often the quality of a girl's work for an en- 
suing school year depends upon her freedom 
from study during the summer. Students 
should be very sure, if they undertake work 
in the summer, that it is not done simply from 
a nervous desire to go on regardless of the 
quality of the work done. But for those in 
perfect health this is an opportunity to try 
their powers in different ways in order to dis- 
cover what it is they really wish to do. A 
summer so spent may keep many a girl from 
slipping into teaching just because it seems 
the only thing she can do. Such a salvation 
will be twofold, for it will save not only the 
girl, but also a profession overcrowded with 
loveless followers. There are so many needs 
to be filled by a woman's work that it is her 
duty to look for some vocation for which she 
is truly adapted, to get out of the ruts of those 
[ 104 ] 



A GirT s Summer 



professions into which women flock because 
they have no initiative. 

Often a girl thinks only of what she will do 
with her own summer without thinking of 
what she will do with her mother's or her 
father's summer. For nine or ten months 
they have been thinking of what they could 
do for her. Sometimes girls do not realize 
the actual need of help and of companion- 
ship which those at home feel, and the older 
people are too unselfish to force this need 
upon their juniors. Between the unselfish- 
ness of those who are older and the self-cen- 
tredness of those who are younger, there is 
often sad havoc made in a home. A girl 
who, after a year's absence and all that has 
been done for her, can't adjust herself to those 
who need her, has still something to learn. / 

If older people cannot do without the buoy- 
ancy of the young, the young cannot very 
well afford to forget the mother and father 
who have much, although no word may be 
didactically spoken, to teach them. Let 

[105] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

the girl take her summer not only as an op- 
portunity to grow closer to her family but also 
as a chance to learn home-making, to train 
herself in the practical things of the home. 
This practical training is often a very valua- 
ble supplement to the school work. The time 
is passed when the learned woman who is 
unable to do anything for herself is the ideal 
— if she ever has been that. The inability to 
make a home for herself, to do all the neces- 
sary things daintily, detracts from a woman's 
power. In practical ways a woman should 
be both dainty and capable. Parents, as well 
as girls, sometimes forget or do not clearly 
recognize the fact that no school, no college, 
can take the place of the home, that schools 
are not primarily schools in home-making, 
but rather schools of general education. The 
summer is a good time for the girl to find her 
place again in the home life, and for both 
parents and children to rejoice in the pleas- 
ures of the home — pleasures and opportunities 
which no institutional life can give. 
[io6] 



XI 

FROM THE SCHOOL TO THE GIRL 

WHAT the school is able to do for 
the girl depends very largely upon 
the girl herself. The majority of 
people with whom she comes in contact do 
not take that into consideration, and the 
school is held unfairly responsible for the 
girl. All any school can do is to use the 
material it finds. Some one has said, with 
harsh but true emphasis, that a college does 
not make a fool, it simply helps in the de- 
velopment of one. As an illustration of its 
limitations, a school sends out two girls from 
the same class ; one girl it is proud to have 
taken as a type, the other it is sorry to have 
represent it. Yet both have been under ex- 
actly the same influence. Students do not 
realize how fearfully at their mercy a school 
is, or that, so far as reputation is concerned, 
it is they who make or mar its credit. 
[ 107] 



A GirTs Student Days and After 

If the school training is worth anything at 
all, it makes the most of unpromising ma- 
terial. Its really discouraging experience is 
not with the girl of limited ability who gives 
her best and so in some sense gets the best, 
but with the student who doesn't give her 
best and who, because of her own indiffer- 
ence, is always misrepresenting the training 
she is receiving. No school ever wishes to 
have its ideals confused by a vulgar display 
of wealth or by loud or conspicuous be- 
haviour. Yet many a school, with ideals all 
that they should be, is misjudged in public 
places because of some thoughtless or unre- 
liable girls. This doesn't seem like fair-play 
or team-play, does it? The fineness of life 
ought to be felt and expressed in student be- 
haviour. Yet how often it is not ! 

Another way in which the ideals of a school 
or college are misrepresented is by lack of 
intellectual integrity. Any school informed 
with a large spirit wishes to meet its students 
on a platform of absolute trust, — -a platform 
[io8] 



From the School to the Girl 



which makes precautions against dishonesty 
unnecessary. Just so long as a school must 
be vigilant in order to keep a few students 
from unfair behaviour, just so long is it pre- 
vented from meeting them all on a basis of 
absolute trust. Why should girls excuse 
themselves for classroom dishonesty ? What 
would they think of a girl who cheated in 
basket-ball? Would they condone that? 
Until student government has recognized 
absolute intellectual integrity as a part of its 
ideas, it will not have achieved its end. The 
rock on which all scholarship is founded is 
honour. Lack of honour is fatal to its ideal. 
" Cribbing," often excused by people who do 
not stop to think, is the small beginning of a 
big evil. 

Many a large institution is like an anxious 
mother, not always infallible in wisdom, but 
personally interested in and eager for the 
success of the individual. A successful girl 
brings credit to her school, for she demon- 
strates, as nothing else can, the fact that the 
[ 109] 



A GirTs Student Days a?td After 

school is achieving its purpose in service to 
the community. How much this encourage- 
ment is needed, girls do not realize, for they 
do not know all the difficulties which institu- 
tions, especially technical and collegiate, 
have to meet in sending their students out 
into the world. In finding a position for a 
student, the school has to consider the whole 
girl. It may care greatly for an attractive 
personality and yet see that its possessor is 
lacking in qualities of faithfulness and ac- 
curacy, and that with its utmost endeavour 
it has never been able to correct these faults. 
On the other hand, the school may have 
those students whose manners, whose dress, 
whose personality, whose spelling, whose 
awkwardly expressed notes, whose lack of 
promptness, make against success in any 
capacity. 

Another point for which the school looks 
in recommending its students is physical 
fitness, which shows itself in many different 
ways : in voice, in carriage, in attractiveness, 



From the School to the Girl 

in staying power. One teacher who had an 
excellent record as a student and was, be- 
sides, a fine girl, had so unpleasant and 
absurd a voice that her students were in a 
continual state of amusement and would 
learn nothing from her. A great many 
teachers have lost in power because of a 
poor voice, strident, or lifeless, or husky, or 
falsetto. A poor enunciation, or words that 
do not carry, are ineffectual means by which 
to reach a class, to hold a customer, or to 
introduce one's self favourably to the interest 
of others. For a girl who is going to have 
any part in public life — and most girls do 
nowadays — 2. good voice is an absolute 
essential. And it is well for us to remember 
that the voice is not something superficial, 
but that it is the expression of that which is 
within. 

Another way in which physical fitness 
shows itself is in the carriage. A girl who 
carries herself with erectness and energy 
brings a certain conviction with her of fitness 

[III] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

for many things, of self-respect, of ability, 
and reveals in her bearing something of her 
mind as well as of her body. We are 
always tempted to think a person who 
"slumps" physically may slump in other 
ways. A good carriage, good voice, and 
strong, clean, digestive system are far more 
important than beauty of features. 

There is another matter at which the 
school in placing its students must look. 
To be a desirable candidate for a good 
position a girl need not be expensively 
gowned, but she must be daintily and freshly 
dressed. Immaculate shirt waist, a plain, 
well-made skirt, with good shoes, stockings 
and gloves and a quiet, pretty hat, are all 
any woman needs in meeting her business 
obligations. And that daintiness which she 
shows in her dress she must show in her 
person too, in clean skin and finger-nails, 
good teeth, and smooth, attractively ar- 
ranged hair. 

It is very important for the interests of a 

[112] 



From the School to the Girl 

school, as well as for the individual, to place 
its students advantageously. To have them 
succeed widens its sphere of usefulness and 
influence and opens new channels of service. 
Every college puts itself to considerable ex- 
pense in looking out for the interests of its 
students, for the glory of a great school lies 
not only in the people whom it collects into 
its midst, but even more in those whom it 
sends out. A girl has no right to go so 
lighdy through her school life that she fails 
to see in it all the self-sacrifice and effort and 
ambitions that have gone into the building 
up of what is her privilege and opportunity. 
In so far as she does this she fails in the 
team-play spirit. Why should a girl think 
that she can spend her father's money, or 
the means of her school, thoughtlessly? 
What would happen to her if she did this 
with the funds of her basket-ball team ? Yet 
girls waste the resources of their school by 
carelessness with its property, a carelessness 
that collectively mounts up into thousands of 

[113] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

dollars, and never once stop to think how- 
difficult every big school finds it to make 
ends meet. 

Before it is too late, at least now that she 
is leaving school, let her stop to realize that 
a great deal of the work for an institution is 
along the line of self-sacrifice, in the gifts 
given, in the work of its administrators and 
teachers. This unselfishness means a finan- 
cial loss, for business ability might be in- 
vested in more lucrative ways ; it means a 
social sacrifice, for there is a certain kind of 
impersonality which is demanded in work 
that deals with a continually changing com- 
munity ; it means risk in the great strain put 
upon physical and nervous strength; it 
means forgetting one's self; for the true 
teacher is willing to be forgotten when she 
has served others. What a school may ac- 
complish for its students is its only com- 
pensation for all this self-sacrifice 



[114] 



XII 

THE WORK TO BE 

ONE of the qualities a girl who has 
completed her school or college life 
needs to show for a few months 
more than anything else is the quality of ad- 
justment, for she will find that she must con- 
tinually adjust herself to new conditions 
whether they be of the home or elsewhere. 
All the time through school she has been in 
some sense a centre of interest. Her class 
has been an important factor in the academic 
life. When she has gone home it has been as 
a school or college girl, and she has been of 
interest because she brought that life into the 
home. But now the attitude of others 
towards her is different. She ceases to be the 
centre of attention, and for her a day of serious 
readjustment is at hand. Perhaps in her 
own estimate she has seemed even more im- 
portant than she really was. She is likely 

[115] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

now to swing from a sense of self-importance 
to an injured feeling of insignificance, and to 
a conviction that people can get along quite 
as well without her. Up to this time when 
she has gone home she has been an honoured 
visitor. But now that she is at home to stay, 
instead of becoming the centre she is merely 
part of the family circle with its obligation of 
doing for others. Her presence in the house- 
hold is no longer a novelty. 

The swift change from a highly-organized, 
methodical life to the life of the home where 
there is not so much method, is hard for a 
girl. One reason it is difficult is that while 
she may be accomplishing a great deal that 
is useful, she seems to be doing nothing and 
to get nowhere. She feels as if she were in 
the midst of a conflict of duties. In school 
she has had implanted in her the idea that 
she must accomplish some definite thing, and 
between this objective and the irregular de- 
mands of the home there appears to be more 
or less clashing. She is confronted by a 
[Ii6] 



The Work to Be 



problem not easy for any one to solve : how- 
to keep her definiteness of aim and work, and 
yet not be self-centred. 

Oftentimes when a girl fails to adjust her- 
self to the home life, her family and friends 
feel that she is rather selfish in her desire to 
carry out her own aims rather than to give 
them up for new demands. Frequently the 
family is as much to blame for not realizing 
that the girl needs to be helped back into the 
old life as the girl is for not being able to 
help herself. In the home the spirit of team- 
play is much needed. Quite as much as the 
girl, the family has a lesson to learn in the art 
of adjustment and in remembering that this 
grown-up child isn't just the same individual 
she was when she went away several years 
ago. They need to realize that the girl may 
be able to give more to the home life than 
she ever did before, but that it will be given 
in a somewhat different way. 

While she is learning the difficult art of 
finding her place again, a great deal depends 
["7] 



A GirTs Student Days and After 

upon the individual girl, not only in the home 
but in the community at large. Sometimes 
she needs to be reminded that although she 
may have had more advantages than those 
left at home, that doesn't necessarily make 
her a superior person. A girl who is inclined 
either to pity or to admire herself too greatly 
should give herself a vigorous shaking. In 
the long run she will find it easier to do that 
on her own account than to have others do it 
for her. The friends at. home, or in the 
church, or in the town, with education of a 
difTerent kind coming to them, may have quite 
as much and more to give her than she to 
give them. One indicator of a really cul- 
tivated woman is her power to adapt her- 
self to the circumstances in which she is 
placed. A gentlewoman never calls atten- 
tion to the difference between herself and 
somebody else. The woman of broad culture 
is the one who makes everybody feel at home 
with her. If a girl's education has been 
worth anything at all, it should give her not 
[Il8] 



The Work to Be 



a superior, set-aside feeling, but a desire to 
be more friendly and useful wherever she 
may be, and, not placing too much stress on 
externals, to look for essentials, to get the full 
value from every person and from every ex- 
perience with which she comes in contact. 

Girls go to so many different kinds of 
homes that it is unlikely that they will meet 
the same sorts of difficulties. There is the 
girl who goes into the society home, where 
it is impossible for her to carry out her ideals 
without conflict with its social standards. On 
the other hand, there is the girl who goes 
into the very simple home where all the 
stress is upon the domestic side of life. And 
there is the girl who has to provide part of 
the family income. Very likely she has the 
hardest problem of all. She enters upon 
some new work, and nine times out of ten 
the way is not made easy for her ; she is a 
novice with all the hardships that come to the 
novice. Perhaps in the beginning she has 
met a very real perplexity in hardly knowing 

[119] 



A Girl's Student Days and After 

what line of work to take up. She has no 
particular interest, no especial talent, no bril- 
liant record, no powerful friends, no money 
with which to establish herself. With her it 
must be as it is with thinking : she must seize 
hold of the thing nearest her. What seems 
to her a temporary and unsatisfactory expe- 
dient will in many cases open out a path 
leading to something much broader. At 
least she may remember this as consolation : 
that even that experience of uncertainty, of 
indecision, is a part of education, and out of 
it, rightly and bravely met, will come some 
richness for her future life. 

The beginning of a work, teaching or any- 
thing else, may have to be rather irksome, 
indeed, may be exceedingly difficult, — an ex- 
perience that will perhaps test staying power 
to the utmost. When it is too late to give 
due appreciation we realize that the work in 
school which was planned for us and arranged 
with our physical and mental well-being in 
view was, after all, not so hard as we thought 
[ 120] 



The Work to Be 



it at the time. We wish that we had enjoyed 
our leisure more and complained less. 

From the point of view of fatigue, as a sec- 
retary, a clerk, a trained nurse, a teacher, a 
social worker, the burden may be so great 
that the girl is disheartened. She is all the 
more disheartened because, knowing that a 
useful life is a strong, steady pull, the way 
before her seems interminable. If she car- 
ries her whip inside her— this counsel is not 
for those of us who are lazy — she does well 
to remember that there is a point beyond 
which fatigue should not be borne, that is, 
when it overdraws her capital of health and 
nervous energy. Raising pigs is preferable 
to a so-called high profession when pig-rais- 
ing is happily joined with a reasonable 
amount of health and security. The pigs 
and health together can always pay mort- 
gages and buy necessities for those depend- 
ent upon us and for ourselves. The high 
calling without health is like a wet paper- 
bag : it will hold nothing. 

[121] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

The girl meets with another difficulty in 
finding out that in almost any line of work a 
great deal of time is needed for the mastery 
of what seem the simplest principles. No 
one wants the girl who hasn't had experience, 
and nobody seems disposed to take her and 
give her that experience. However, we all 
find some one who is hardy enough or kind 
enough to try us ; and as every year now 
there is more effort put into finding the work 
girls are most suited to do, there is no excuse 
for slipping into teaching as a last resort. 
Not unnaturally we sometimes distrust our- 
selves, especially in taking up an occupation 
to which we are not accustomed. And in 
her new work the girl, uncertain of her abil- 
ity to master what she has undertaken, is 
placed in a position in which she has the en- 
couragement of neither the school nor the 
home. Before, she has put much of the re- 
sponsibility for her work and life upon parents 
and instructors. Now she has to be her own 
judge and pass judgment on herself and her 

[122] 



The Work to Be 



work. She has, too, not only to lift her own 
weight but the weight of others as well. As 
she longs for cooperation, good will and en- 
couragement the value of the team-play spirit 
has never seemed so great before. 

We do not need to be told to remember 
the happy and easy experiences of life. No 
girl forgets them. What we do need is some 
one to tell us where the hard places will be, 
to warn us, to stiffen our courage and to 
point clearly to the uses of hard work and 
adversity. And although this may seem like 
placing another straw on the poor camel's 
back, it is now time to say that in her life- 
work, whether it be in her home or outside, a 
girl should be very clear in her mind what 
her aims and purposes are. If she is working 
solely for the praise and commendation of 
others, she will often be grievously disap- 
pointed. Not in recognition does real re- 
ward lie, but in the work itself. If she wins 
great popularity she is likely to find that there 
[ 123] 



A GirPs Student Days and After 

is nothing that shifts so quickly and is such 
a quicksand. If material wealth is her sole 
object she will harden into the thing she 
seeks and add but another joyless barbarian 
to a modern world congratulating itself that 
barbarism is a thing of the past, and yet pre- 
senting the spectacle of a mammon worship 
such as has never been seen before. If gold 
is her end, and not the means to a nobler 
end, then she will find herself constantly sac- 
rificing higher issues to that, and lowering 
her one-time ideals. Truly the woman who 
marries solely for the comforts of a home, the 
woman who teaches, or nurses for "pay" 
alone, has her reward, and that is in self-de- 
struction. She is a carrier of barbarism, not 
of culture ; of disease, not of health ; of trib- 
ulation, not of joy. The only real reward 
there can be lies in the idealism, the joy, the 
strength of the work done and in a mind and 
heart conscious of having done their best. 

THE END 
[ 124 ] 



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reminds one somewhat of the "I,ady of the Decoration." This 
similarity adds, however, rather than detracts from the 
charm of the book. She is thoroughly good-natured and 
clever and companionable, with a whimsical and ever-present 
sense of humor." — Chicago Bvening Post. 

JSLA MA Y MULLINS 

The Boy from Hollow Hut 

Illustrated, i2mo, cloth, net $i.oo. 

Readers of John Fox, Jr.'s stories will recognize the 
location of this story at once. The author and her husband. 
President of the great Theological Seminary of L,ouisville, 
have taken a large interest in these descendants of some of 
the best American stock. Through the tender humanness of 
her narrative Mrs. Mullins bids fair to gain a large audi- 
ence for this intensely interesting work. 

DR. OLIVIA A. BALDWIN 

Sita, A Story of Child-Marriage Fetters. 
i2mo, cloth, net $1.25. 

A realistic story of native and mission life in India; a( 
story dealing with the stress of famine and the pathetic con- 
dition of India's child-widows. 

MRS. MA UP JOHNSON ELMORE 

The Revolt of Sundaramma 

With an introduction by Helen B. Montgomery. 
Illustrated by Gertrude H. B. Hooker. Net $1.00. 

Sundaramma, a Hindu maiden, is the heroine of this 
story which relates her revolt against child marriage and her 
flight from such slavery. 



FICTION 



NORM AN DUNCAN Author of 'Dr. Luke," etc. 

The Measure of a Man 

A Tale of the Big Woods. Illustrated, net $1.25. 

"The Measure of a Man" is Mr, Duncan's first ftiU-sized 
novel having a distinct motif and purpose since "Doctor I^uke 
of The I^abrador." The tale of the big woods has for its 
hero, John Fairmeadow — every inch a man whom the Lumber 
Jacks of his parish in the pines looked up to as their Sky 
Pilot. Human nature in the rough is here portrayed with a 
faithfulness that is convincing. 

ROBERT E. KNOWLES Author of ''St. Cuthbertsr etc 

The Singer of the Kootenay 

A Tale of To-day. i2mo, cloth, net $1.20. 

The scene of action for Mr. Knowles' latest novel is in 
the Crow's Nest Pass of the Kootenay Mountains of British 
Columbia. To this dramatic field he has gone for local color 
and has taken every advantage of his wide knowledge, pic- 
turing life of every phase in his most artistic style. 

HAROLD BEGBIE Author 0/" Twice-Born Men" 

The Shadow 

I2m!0, cloth, net $1.25. 
A new story by the novelist whose study of regenera- 
tion, "T'wice-JBorn Men" has made the religious world fairly 
gasp at its startling revelations of the almost overlooked 
proofs of the power of conversion to be found among the 
lowest humanity. His latest work is a brilliant study of 
modern life which will maintain the author's reputation. 

RUPERT HUGHES 

Miss 318 

A Story in Season and out of Season. Illustrated, 
i2mo, cloth, net 75c. 

"Is there any excuse for one more Christmas story?" 
"Surely nothing has been left unsaid." "The truth, per- 
haps." "The truth? — about Christmas! Would anybody care 
to read it?" "Perhaps." "But would anybody dare to pub- 
lish it?" "Probably not." "that sounds interesting! What 
nobody would care to read and nobody would dare to pub- 
lish, ought to be well worth writing." 

/. /. BELL Author of "Oh ! Christina .'" etc. 

The Indiscretions of Maimer Redhorn 

Illustrated, i6mo, cloth, net 6oc. 

The thousands who have read Wrullie McWattie's Mas- 
ter will need no introduction to this Scottish 'penter" and 
bis "pint o' view." The same dry Scottish humor, win- 
ning philosophy and human nature fairly overflow these 
sages. 



m 10 1912 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 



JAN 1C 1912 



